Debian Project News - June 9th, 2008

Welcome to this year's 4th issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian
community.
Some of the topics covered in this issue:

Release Update

Beta-2 of the Lenny Debian Installer released

Report from LinuxTag 2008

Call for help by the german translation team

... and much more.

Release Update

Marc Brockschmidt reported
about the status of the upcoming stable release. After some major transitions, like the
ocamltransitionLenny is in good shape, but still a lot of work needs to be done.
Since the armel architecture made great improvements the release team
decided to upgrade it to a proper release architecture.

Regarding Lenny the Qt/KDE Packaging Team
decided that
the upcoming release will be shipped with KDE 3.5.9 (and with the KDE 4.1
development platform: kde4libs, kdepimlibs and kdebase-runtime).

Debian Installer for Lenny Beta-2 ready for testing

The second beta version of the Debian Installer for the upcoming
release Lenny has been released. Some new or improved features are:

Linux Kernel version 2.6.24

i386 and amd64 have a new boot menu, allowing a more user-friendly selection of boot options (e.g. for the graphical installer)

full support for encrypted partitioning for the graphical installer

The installer will warn users when the translation of the installer to their language is incomplete

When using the KDE or Xfce CD images it is now possible to select additional tasks

Images for different installation media and architectures are available
for testing. After using
the Debian-Installer, please send an installation report, even if there
weren't any problems.

Bits from the ftp-masters

Joerg Jaspert sent out bits from the ftp-masters
containing recent
activities of that team, including some personnel changes as well as a lot
of code changes regarding Debian's infrastructure improving the overall
teamwork, for example by making it easier for the release team to handle
transitions. He also asked for volunteers for new ftp assistants. Later he
reported
that he already got four volunteers as well as several other suggestions
for improvements.

Report from LinuxTag 2008

Bastian Venthur and
Noel Koethe
reported about this year's Debian booth at the LinuxTag 2008, a major conference
about free software in Europe. Marko Jung, one of the organisers,
added thanks
for the good job the booth staff did. He also notes, that there was a high demand
from the visitors' side for a Debian sub-conference at next year's LinuxTag.

Christian Perrier reported
that the french translation team finished translating all templates for the debconf system,
helping users to configure packages on installation time. He notes, that some of these packages
still need to add the translated templates. German, Czech and Portuguese are also quite close to
the 100% mark.

Call for help by the German translation team

The German translation team sent a
call for help
for the translation of package descriptions. The upcoming stable release will support
showing users translated descriptions of available packages, but currently only 2100 of
the more than 18000 package descriptions are translated to German. The statistics
for other languages are similar. Information on how to help the ongoing translation
effort is available at
our website.

Other News

The 8th issue of the miscellaneous news for developers
has been released and covers the following
topics: Minor update to the mailing list code of conduct, Document aimed at
upstreams in preparation, d-i beta2 in preparation (breaks beta 1), New
transition check tool.

Debian's Security Team released among others advisories for the packages Samba,
Linux2.6.18
and tomcat 5.5.
Please look at them and take the proper measures.

Please note, that those are only the most important security advisories of the last
two weeks. If you would like to be always up to date regarding security advisories
released by the Debian Security Team, please subscribe to
our mailing list for security announcements.

Work-needing packages

Currently 450 packages are orphaned and 107 packages are up for adoption. Please take a look
at the recentreports if there are packages
you are interested in or view the complete archive of packages requesting
help.

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